Morgan, Tracy

Contemporary Black Biography
COPYRIGHT 2005 Thomson Gale

Morgan, Tracy

1968—

Comedian, actor

On the television sitcom 30 Rock, Tracy Morgan portrays a wild, unpredictable, egotistical entertainment industry personality. The real Tracy Morgan, on the other hand, has been married to his high school sweetheart for 20 years and is a devoted family man. Best known for his seven-season run on Saturday Night Live, Morgan has forged a successful comedy career by straddling the surprisingly fine line between those two roles. He has been both edgy and domesticated in both his private and professional lives.

Tracy Morgan was born on November 10, 1968, in the Bronx, New York. When he was six years old, his father Jimmy, a Vietnam veteran and musician, left the family, leaving his mother Alicia to raise her five children—of which Tracy was second oldest—as a single parent in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. Growing up in a rugged housing project, Morgan dabbled in certain illicit activities in order to get by. He never fully embraced the street lifestyle, however. "I did some things I'm not proud of," Morgan was quoted as saying in a December 2003 Entertainment Weekly article. "I tried my little hand at drug dealing, but that wasn't me." Morgan turned instead to humor

as a way to deal with the sense of abandonment he felt from his father's departure.

When Morgan was a sophomore at DeWitt Clinton High School, he learned that his father, a drug addict, had AIDS. He dropped out of school to help care for him until he died in 1987; Morgan had lost his father a second time. The same year, Morgan married his high school sweetheart, Sabina, and they were already raising the first of their three sons, Gitrid. While they were scraping by on public assistance, Morgan began to supplement the young family's income by doing comedy in the streets. "I was hustling. I would do a fat Michael Jackson from the projects. I was just working on pure imagination," Morgan was quoted as saying in a January 2004 article in People Weekly.

In the early 1990s, Morgan began bringing his comedy act indoors, finding stand-up work in some of New York's popular comedy clubs. His inspiration was Martin Lawrence, whom he had first seen on HBO in 1992. "I thought, ‘He's like me. I could do that too,’" Morgan was quoted as saying in People Weekly. His stand-up career gained steam over the next couple of years. He performed at the high-profile Uptown Com- edy Club in Harlem, where he created such characters as Hustleman, which became a permanent part of his repertoire. He soon began touring nationally, and he landed a spot on HBO's Def Comedy Jam, which regularly featured the country's best young African-American comics. His success on the stand-up circuit led to a recurring spot on his former role-model Lawrence's situation comedy Martin, on which he recreated the Hustleman character he had developed in his stand-up act.

Morgan continued to appear periodically on Martin through 1996. That year, he got the biggest break of his career when he was cast as a regular on NBC's legendary late-night comedy show Saturday Night Live, which has launched the big-league careers of a virtual Who's Who of American comedians. This sudden elevation to the heights of show business was jarring for Morgan. "It was definitely a culture shock for me," he remarked, according to People Weekly. "But I had people like Lorne (Michaels, SNL producer) and Will Ferrell to guide me." Morgan spent the next seven television seasons creating a vast list of memorable characters, including Bronx apartment superintendent Dominican Lou, Astronaut Jones, flamboyantly gay animal show host Brian Fellow, moonshiner Uncle Jemimah, and homeless ladies' man Woodrow. He also specialized in celebrity impersonations, some of his most well received being Star Jones, Maya Angelou, and Mike Tyson.

Throughout his tenure on SNL, Morgan branched out into other projects, including live comedy, films, and other television shows. He continued to tour with his stand-up act across the country. In 2001 he appeared in the role of Pumpkin Escobar in Kevin Smith's film Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. Two years later he played the character Meat Man in the movie Head of State, a vehicle for Chris Rock. In between, he made his own TV comedy special, "Tracy Morgan: One Mic," for Comedy Central in 2002. From 2002 to 2004, Morgan's voice was used in the Comedy Central series Crank Yankers, which employed puppets to reenact actual prank calls made by show regulars and celebrity guests.

In 2003 Morgan quit SNL to star in his own prime-time NBC sitcom, The Tracy Morgan Show. In the show, Morgan starred as Tracy Mitchell, a devoted family man and proprietor of his own auto repair shop. The role was actually much closer to the real Morgan—a parent since early adulthood—than were the outrageous characters he had been playing on SNL. This came as a surprise to both his costars and the show's audience, who were more accustomed to a wilder and crazier Tracy. But with the show, Morgan was determined to provide quality family entertainment. "The only difference is in real life, it takes more than 22 minutes to solve problems," he was quoted as saying in Entertainment Weekly. Unfortunately, The Tracy Morgan Show did not particularly impress either critics or a large number of viewers; it lasted only one season.

Morgan reunited with fellow SNL alum Tina Fey in 2006 on Fey's NBC sitcom 30 Rock. The show—whose executive producer is SNL producer Lorne Michaels—revolves around the set of a live comedy variety show reminiscent of SNL. Morgan plays Tracy Jordan, an unpredictable movie star who has been recruited to be a regular on the show. 30 Rock was generally applauded by critics, receiving nominations for a handful of industry honors. One of its stars, Alec Baldwin, won Golden Globe and Screen Actors' Guild awards. Ratings, on the other hand, were mediocre, but appeared likely that the show would survive to see a second season of production. Morgan's career, however, remained in high gear.